With all the many company names that you will hear over at the radio, and see over at your newspaper or on your computer screen, it’s hard to think that someone or a single organization can monopolize certain products or services. But unknown to normal people, entities such as these ones exist.
Cracked.com lists six monopolies that you wouldn’t have thought to have existed. Check them out over at the site. For now, here’s one that you’ll be very much surprised.
Tabasco Has Just One Factory To Make All Its Sauce
Speaking of stuff that's both food and the sacred blood of God, Tabasco sauce can be found in 185 countries with sales totaling 700,000 bottles a day. So, in the unlikely event that you'd given the matter much thought before now, you'd have assumed that this was some big international operation.
The world is a colorful place. At least, that’s what our brains tell us after processing the light that has passed through our eyes. Scientific research has shown for quite some that the colors we see are not really features inherent to the physical world. Rather, we see these colors because of how our brains process light.
A new study co-authored by a University of Chicago neuroscientist identifies those neural networks, particularly the areas of the brain that encode the colors we actually see.
“We’ve been able to show where it happens in the visual pathway, which is relatively early,” said Prof. Steven Shevell, a leading scholar of color and brightness perception. “It’s like a road map that shows where to look for the neural circuits that cause the transition from the earliest neural representations of the physical world to our mental world.”
While they were able to show in their study that the colors we “see” are in fact just how our brains perceive and process visual information, Shevell and his colleagues were not able to show how these transitions happen.
A few days ago, a brand new Minecraft game, developed by Mojang Studios and Double Eleven and published by Xbox Game Studios, was released for multiple platforms like the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Windows, and Xbox One. The new Minecraft game, however, does not feature two of the most iconic features in the original game, which is mining, and crafting. Instead, the new game, aptly titled Minecraft Dungeons, offers the player a hack-and-slash experience inside the dungeons of the Minecraft universe.
Here’s the elevator pitch: a great evil is threatening the land with swarms of familiar Minecraft mobs, and a lone hero must battle it back. But instead of the often-awkward first-person perspective of the base game, this time you’re hacking and slashing in isometric third-person.
The question is, is this good or is this bad? K. Thor Jensen evaluates the game on his article over at PCMag.
The Long Island serial killer, who is believed to have killed twenty, targeted mostly sex workers. One of the possible victims has been identified by the Suffolk County Police Department. Valerie Mack was a former Jane Doe that disappeared in 2000. Mack was working as an escort in Philadelphia at the time of her disappearance, as Rolling Stone details:
a website created by the SCPD to track updates in the case, Mack’s partial remains were found in November 2000 in a wooded area in Manorville, New York (it’s believed her remains had been dumped there a few months prior in September). Eleven years later, in April 2011, additional remains belonging to Mack were found much further away on Ocean Parkway, near Oak Beach. That location, however, is not far from Gilgo Beach, where the remains of several other victims had been found.
Mack was identified using genetic genealogy, reportedly a first of its kind for a police investigation in New York State. SCPD Commissioner Geraldine Hart said in a video statement that the process allowed investigators to establish a genealogy profile of the victim, which provided new leads to pursue. Hart said investigators followed the trail to New Jersey, where they spoke with potential relatives who provided additional DNA samples, which were then used to narrow down and confirm Mack’s identity.
A bear was roaming around a city in Florida, and the authorities managed to catch it with the help of sweets. No tranquilizers were used in catching the roaming bear. According to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Officer Adam Brown, drugs don’t usually work with large animals such as bears. The bear was instead lured into a trap sprayed with a blueberry-pie scent, along with Krispy Kreme doughnuts!
It’s a golden necklace, adorned with a golden toilet roll pendant. The necklace, dubbed “the deluxe toilet roll chain,”retails for $75. It was created by German jeweler Jonathan Johnson. The Hamburg-based jeweler wanted to tap into something common yet rare, as Forbes detailed:
It’s selling on his website for $75, and each necklace is made from gold-plated sterling silver. From each sale, 20% goes to a local homeless nonprofit called Arzt Mobil Hamburg.
“When the coronacrisis hit, you could see on TV how people jumped on toilet paper,” said Johnson.
“The diamond, the most desirable object of desire, and a symbol of wealth, was suddenly replaced by toilet paper.”
The goal is to create an object that will represent our current crisis for future generations looking back on 2020.
“The thought that, in the future, this crisis will be looked back on in a few generations, this could be an enchanting side effect,” he said.
If you’re looking for some good movie recommendations, maybe this one’s right up your alley. Time Magazine has listed their top five 2020 movie releases. Even though we might not see them at the theaters, most of them are available on different streaming platforms. Check out their full list here. Do you agree with their picks?
The more we learn about the depths of the earth's oceans, the more we realize there is so much more we don't know. And that's one reason the deep sea is a great setting for movies- it provides adventure, danger, tension, and fear of the unknown. But ocean movies often take liberties, because most folks (both filmmakers and audience) don't know much about what really goes on down there. The Ringer talked to marine biologist Dr. Stephen Kajiura of Florida Atlantic University to find out how realistic Hollywood movies are, like the ones that feature giant unknown monsters from the deepest trenches.
There’s just not enough energy down there for them. The bigger you are, you need a lot of calories. And there’s just not that much productivity in a deep-sea environment to be able to support big organisms. Also the bigger you are, you feed farther down on the food chain. Think of whales. Whales are the biggest thing in the ocean but they feed on little tiny plankton, krill, things like that. And they need to be feeding on these little tiny things because you need a lot of it to support their massive size.
As you get bigger and bigger and bigger—the whale sharks, the basking sharks, they’re all filter feeders. When they show these giant, enormous things that are out for human blood, it’s not going to work. Energetically, you can’t make that sustainable. You can’t be that big and still need to eat near the top of the food chain. There’s just not going to be enough out there to support you.
Kajiura explains movie inaccuracies about sea creatures, pressures, actual ocean exploration, and how marine biologists are depicted in movies ranging from The Abyss to Aquaman to Deep Blue Sea to Finding Nemo at the Ringer. -via Digg
Tim Rousu and his family rent a house in Queensland, Australia. Due to social distancing rules, the agency that owns the home skipped their usual home inspection and instead asked him to send in pictures, two of each room, "to confirm the house is still upright." Rousu saw that as a unique opportunity for some fun, and took pictures of each room that included himself or a family member doing amusing or even horrifying things. Watch as he takes a bath, becomes stuck under the bed, and gets waterboarded by his daughter. You can see all the images and read about Rousu's home inspection adventure at Bored Panda.
Now that’s something to admire. I can’t even work out comfortably in slightly tight clothes! Victorian women did exercises devised to account for the fact that women would be constricted by their clothing and elaborate hairstyles. Instead of burning calories, the Victorian women followed workouts that focused on blood flow. These workouts were also mainly written by men, as Mental Floss details:
In his 1827 book A Treatise on Calisthenic Exercises, Signor G.P. Voarino detailed dozens of options for women, including skipping, walking in zigzags, marching in place, and bending your arms and legs at specific angles. Some exercises even called for the use of a cane, though they were more geared towards balancing and stretching than weight-lifting.
To Voarino, the light calisthenic exercises were meant for “counteracting every tendency to deformity, and for obviating such defects of figure as are occasioned by confinement within doors, too close an application to sedentary employment, or by those constrained positions which young ladies habitually assume during their hours of study.”
Nearly 30 years later, Catharine Beecher (Harriet Beecher Stowe's sister) published her own workout guide, Physiology and Calisthenics for Schools and Families, which encouraged educators especially to incorporate exercise programs for all children into their curricula. Beecher was against corsets, but the illustrations in her book did still depict young ladies in long dresses—it would be some time before students were expected to change into gym clothes at school. Many of Beecher’s calisthenic exercises were similar to Voarino’s, though she included some beginner ballet positions, arm circles, and other faster-paced movements.
Tonya Ruiz, a former model turned custom toymaker, has for years made realistic versions of Barbie and her household accessories. She publishes them on her appropriately-named Instagram feed Grandma Gets Real.
Recently, she's been producing kits for what Barbie, Ken, and their children would actually be living like if they were quarantined during the pandemic. Barbie is getting by as a homeschooling mom of young children who rarely dresses appropriately during her Zoom meetings and enjoys her new hobbies of baking and assembling jigsaw puzzles.
We’ve grown up seeing futuristic weapons such as laser beams in sci-fi movies. Now, it has become a reality, as the US Navy successfully tests its new laser weapon system. This video of the USS Portland shows that the laser weapon system onboard the ship was able to disable the unmanned drone, which appeared to catch on fire quickly.
The Technology Maturation Laser Weapon System Demonstrator (LWSD) MK 2 MOD 0, developed by Northrup Grumman, allows ships to defend themselves against drones and even smaller enemy boats, the Navy claims.
According to a recent report, the market for similar energy weapon systems are on the rise across the globe, with a new arms race as nations look for novel ways to enhance border security and counter threats including drones and missiles.
“With this new advanced capability, we are redefining war at sea for the Navy,” Karrey Sanders, commanding officer of the USS Portland, said in the statement.
Bridgton, Maine — At around 6 in the morning of July 29, 2019, a man named Nat Woodruff found a dead bald eagle found floating face-down on the Highland Lake. Also found dead near the eagle was a loon chick. The man left the dead bird appropriately while he called the Warden Service. After a few moments, Maine Game Warden Neal Wykes arrived and brought the dead eagle to the Norway Veterinary Hospital for a radiograph to determine if the bird was shot.
No metal showed up on the image, but during the external exam a puncture wound on the eagle’s chest was discovered.
What caused the puncture wound? It was stated that it could be from the beak of an adult loon.
A loon’s best weapon is its dagger-like bill, and it will often attack adversary loons by coming up from beneath the water’s surface with its bill straight towards the other loon’s sternum, or chest. Many adult loons have several healed-over sternal punctures from fights like these.
This could mean that an adult loon (probably the chick’s parent) could have gone in to rescue the chick from the talons of the eagle. Unfortunately, the chick did not survive the ordeal.
The reason this is so interesting to loon researchers is that such a case has not been documented before. We know conflicts between bald eagles and loons have soared in recent years as a result of the recovery of our eagle population. We are seeing more and more eagle predation on loon chicks and even adult loons. Who would think a loon would stand a chance against such a powerful predator?
Sure enough, the pathologist who examined the eagle and loon chick in the lab, called me shortly afterward to tell me it indeed looked as though the loon was the culprit in this eagle’s death. The size of the puncture wound was similar to the size of a loon’s bill, and it extended straight to the heart which likely led to a quick death. Not only that, but the loon chick had puncture marks consistent with the spacing of eagle talons.
Brad Balukjian is a lifelong baseball fan who spent his childhood in the 1980s collecting baseball cards. Upon reaching his 30s, Balukjian realized he was at the age that most baseball players are retired, with a lot of life left. What happened to all those sports heroes on the cards he collected in his youth? To find out, he devised a plan that eventually became the basis for his new book The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife.
Pondering what happened to his heroes after they retired, Balukjian came up with a plan: In fall 2014, he went on eBay and ordered about a dozen sealed packs of Topps baseball cards from 1986, and opened them, searching for a pack with a set of 14 players who would make for a good cross-country road trip.
While digging into all those old baseball-card packs, Balukjian even gave into the temptation to try the nearly 30-year-old gum. “I remove the calcified stick of gum with the caution of a bomb expert, place it in my mouth, and clench down on its powdered surface, splintering it into a thousand crumbs, which instantly dissolve on my tongue,” he writes in The Wax Pack. “It’s delightfully gross.”
Once he settled on a pack, Balukjian then planned to spend the summer of 2015 driving across the United States in his 2002 Honda Accord trying to meet each of the former players in his baseball-card pack, the “Wax Packers” as he calls them, to find out what fate befell each one. He would blog about his adventures each day of the trip and hoped the blog could turn into a book.
Balukjian settled on a pack of 14 players and managed to meet and get to know most of them. He found them to be much more interesting and complex than their baseball cards, or their sports careers, would lead one to believe. They came from varied backgrounds, often from small towns, broken homes, and even abusive childhoods. They dealt with career problems such as adultery, racism, and substance abuse. The Wax Packers opened up to him for the most part and became friends. Read about that road trip, and oh yeah baseball cards, too, in an article that will appeal to both fans and people who don't know a thing about baseball at Collectors Weekly.
Star City is a gated community in Russia that was built in the 1960s specifically for the Soviet space program. The only residents are those who work in the industry and their families, which today is about 6,000 people. Despite its government mission and dependence, Star City survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, and is still centered around space exploration. And it's not always been completely off-limits to everyone. The facilities were super-secret during the space race, but after the Apollo moon landing, there was a seismic shift.
Then, the unthinkable happened in 1973 when Uncle Sam arrived. “The Soviet and American spacemen will go up into outer space for the first major joint scientific experiment in the history of mankind,” announced Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, “They know that from outer space our planet looks even more beautiful [and] it is big enough for us to live peacefully on it, but it is too small to be threatened by nuclear war.”
Dubbed the “Apollo-Soyuz Mission,” the joint venture was an extremely sensitive, highly calculated effort to end the Space Race – or at least ease tensions between Soviets and Americans.
While politicians played, well, politics, the scientists, astronauts, and cosmonauts got along well in Star City. And the American presence remained after Soyuz. Read about NASA in Star City at Messy Messy Chic.
